In Whitby, England in 1913, Count Dracula (Frank Langella) arrives from Transylvania via the ship Demeter one stormy night. A sickly Mina Van Helsing (Jan Francis), who is visiting her friend Lucy Seward (Kate Nelligan), discovers Dracula's body after his ship has run aground. The Count visits Mina and her friends at the household of Lucy's father, Dr. Jack Seward (Donald Pleasence), whose clifftop mansion also serves as the local asylum. At dinner, he proves to be a charming guest and leaves a strong impression on the hosts, Lucy especially. Less charmed by this handsome Romanian count is Jonathan Harker (Trevor Eve), Lucy's fiancé.
An abandoned ship crashes into a dockyard in Brooklyn, New York, and the ship inspector, Silas Green, finds it full of corpses. Elsewhere, Julius Jones, Silas's nephew, has a run-in with some Italian mobsters. Just as the two goons are about to kill Julius, Maximillian, a suave, mysterious vampire (who arrived on the ship in his intricately carved coffin), intervenes and kills them. Soon after, Maximillian infects Julius with his vampiric blood, turning Julius into a decaying ghoul and claiming that it has benefits; he then explains that he has come to Brooklyn in search of the Dhampir daughter of a vampire from his native Caribbean island in order to live beyond the night of the next full moon.
High school senior Buffy Summers (Kristy Swanson) is introduced as a stereotypical, shallow cheerleader at Hemery High School in Los Angeles. She is a carefree popular mean girl whose main concerns are shopping and spending time with her rich, snooty friends and her boyfriend, Jeffrey. While at school one day, she is approached by a man who calls himself Merrick (Donald Sutherland). He informs her that she is The Slayer, or Chosen One, and he is a Watcher whose duty it is to guide and train her. She initially rebukes his claims, but finally becomes convinced that he is right when he is able to describe a recurring dream of hers in detail. In addition, Buffy is exhibiting uncanny abilities not known to her, including heightened agility, senses, and endurance, yet she repeatedly tries Merrick's patience with her frivolous nature and sharp-tongued remarks.
The story features seventeen-year-old Dhampir (half-human, half-vampire) guardian-in-training Rose Hathaway (Zoey Deutch), and her royal Moroi (the peaceful, mortal vampires) best friend Lissa Dragomir (Lucy Fry) living discreetly within our world, having escaped from their boarding school St. Vladimir's Academy one year prior to the beginning of the story, following a series of warnings and threats. They are soon dragged back to the Academy in Montana and rediscover the dangerous hierarchy within it, along with lies, rumors and secrets, both struggling to fit in to the school politics. Rose starts to form an attraction to her Russian Dhampir mentor and fellow Guardian, Dimitri Belikov (Danila Kozlovsky).
Sang-hyun is a Catholic priest who volunteers at the hospital, providing ministry to the patients. He is well respected for his unwavering faith and dedicated service, but he secretly suffers from overwhelming feelings of doubt and sadness. Sang-hyun volunteers to participate in an experiment to find a vaccine for the deadly Emmanuel Virus (EV). Although the experiment fails disastrously and Sang-hyun is infected with the seemingly fatal disease, he makes a complete and rapid recovery after receiving a blood transfusion.
The crew of the space shuttle Churchill finds a 150-mile long spaceship hidden in the corona of Halley's Comet. The crew finds hundreds of dead, shrivelled bat-like creatures and three naked humanoid bodies (two male and one female) in suspended animation within glass containers. The crew recovers the three aliens and begins the return trip to Earth.
Oskar, a meek 12-year-old boy, resides with his mother Yvonne in the western Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg in 1981 and occasionally visits his father Erik in the countryside. It is not clear why Erik is living apart from Yvonne, but on one such visit, when Oskar and Erik are enjoying a cosy night playing games, a drunken neighbour arrives and Erik starts to drink heavily with him, breaking up the cosy father/son evening. Oskar collects clippings from newspapers and magazines about grisly murders and pictures of hunting knives. He keeps a knife under his mattress.
The year is 1893: solicitor Thomas Renfield travels all the way from London to "Castle Dracula" in Transylvania to finalize Count Dracula's purchase of Carfax Abbey in England. As the sun sets, and the stagecoach driver refuses to take him any further, Renfield continues on foot despite the villagers pleading with him to turn back.
Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve) is a beautiful and dangerous immortal vampire, promising specially chosen humans eternal life as her vampire lovers. As the film begins, her vampire companion is John (David Bowie), a talented cellist whom she married in 18th century France. The film opens in a night club in New York, to a live performance from Bauhaus. There they connect with another young couple who are brought home and fed upon by slashing their throats with a bladed Ankh pendant. The bodies are disposed of by an incinerator in the basement of John and Miriam's elegant New York townhouse, where they pose as a wealthy couple who teach classical music. The only student shown is a young tomboy violinist named Alice Cavender (Beth Ehlers).
Being 400 years old, the Countess has collected a stable of young men and women who accompany her on her centuries-old journey through eternal night-and youth. While she is immortal, she is required to drink the blood of a young male virgin three times by Halloween each year to keep her immortality and youthful appearance - a task she finds increasingly and extremely hard, since attractive young male virgins are almost impossible to find in the 1980s, particularly in hedonistic cities, in this case, Los Angeles.
Twelve-year-old Goku seeks out Master Roshi to ask to be accepted as a student, while the little monk, Krillin, arrives for the same reason (and uses a porno magazine as a bribe). Roshi sends them on a quest far to the west, where "five mountains stand, called the 'Devil's Hand'." Inside a castle, there lies the legendary, and beautiful, "Sleeping Princess." Whoever brings back the Sleeping Princess will become Master Roshi's student. The two boys set out, and Krillin uses all the standard tricks to trip Goku up.
Sean (Kerr Smith) is driving cross country to his sister's wedding when he picks up Nick (Brendan Fehr), a hitchhiker who happens to be a vampire hunter hunting a group of vampires led by Kit (Johnathon Schaech), one of the Forsaken.
In 1921, German director Frederich Wilhelm Murnau takes his cast and crew on-location in Czechoslovakia to shoot Nosferatu, an unauthorized version of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Murnau keeps his team in the dark about their schedule and the actor playing the vampire Count Orlok. It is left to the film's other main actor, Gustav von Wangenheim, to explain that the lead is an obscure German theater performer named Max Schreck, who is a character actor. To involve himself fully in his role, Schreck will only appear amongst the cast and crew in makeup, and will never break character.
Married for centuries and now living half a world apart, two vampires wake as the sun goes down. Adam sits holding a lute, in his cluttered Detroit Victorian, as Eve wakes up in her bedroom in Tangier, surrounded by books. Rather than feeding on humans, they are, like addicts, dependent on local suppliers of the "good stuff", fearing contamination from blood poisoned by the degradation of the environment. Adam visits a local blood bank in the dead of night, masquerading as "Dr. Faust", paying "Dr. Watson" for his coveted O negative, while Eve relies on their old friend Christopher Marlowe, who faked his death in 1593 and now lives under the protection of a local man.